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I'm kind of bummed these days. If you buy into the seven stages of grief, depression is the last step before a healthy acceptance, so that's good, right?
Of course being in the depression stage means I've finally exited the denial stage. He had his initial screening with the school district for the PPCD (Preschool Program for Children with Disabilities) class, which basically functioned as yet another opportunity for an independent group of evaluators to tell me, "Oh yes, he has problems." There might, just might have been a small part of me that was still quietly insisting that we were still in red-flag territory, that he'd just have a little speech therapy and everything would turn out okay. I can neither confirm nor deny the existence of my denial. At any rate, the only question now is precisely which class would be best suited for him, so we go back for the big multi-hour evaluation in April. End of denial? Check. And either way, all these classes follow the school district's schedule, so we're still completely on our own for the summer. Depression setting in? Check.
Oh yeah, the summer. That time when my stepchildren descend upon my house for 6 weeks straight, throwing both us and them into chaos as everyone's established routines are chucked out the window. We usually send them to a day camp for some number of weeks, but the fact is I am available at home--so the question always becomes, how much money is my sanity worth? And that's just my annual level of stress, this year we get to add in new difficulties like, what the hell would I do with them while Minifob is in therapy? Can I really leave them out in the waiting room for an hour? But can I justify the cost of sending them to camp for a whole week just to avoid that dilemma?
Oh, and to top it off, my Early Childhood Intervention visitor (I refuse to call her a therapist because she does nothing remotely like therapy with him, she barely even interacts with him,) accidentally made me feel like crap. She asked if he was still on "the diet," meaning the full GFCF diet generally recommended for autistic kids. I told her he was only on a dairy-free diet, because going completely gluten-free had just been so incredibly hard, and we hadn't seen any dramatic changes like we had with dairy. She reminded me that it often takes several weeks for everything to clear the system, and she had even seen one child where it took a whole month, but after that of course the change was bordering on miraculous... she was just trying to be supportive, I know, but all I heard was, "Other parents are dedicated enough to make their children healthier, why aren't you?" If there were a way I could know for sure that it would help, I could do it, I know. It's just the possibility that it might do nothing at all that makes it so hard to consider attempting it again. She suggested getting him allergy tested--but then readily acknowledged that the skin prick tests rarely show anything conclusive, because obviously if there were big skin reactions to things he's eating every day we would be seeing it. We could demand blood tests... oh, but those are often inaccurate in children under 6. Really, the "easiest" thing is just try it (indefinitely, of course!) and see if there are improvements. Yeah, easy for you to say, lady. You don't have to deal with the kid who writhes on the floor wailing "Yellow" for an hour because I won't let him have his standard (yellow) Eggo waffle for breakfast.
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